Core Team

Dawn Melville

patconley Core Team
Dawn Melville

A creative and multifaceted entrepreneur with particular expertise in generating, testing, developing and turning ideas into business opportunities. With a wide portfolio across digital technology, media, design and research, Dawn has a natural flair for sparking off, bringing together and leading collaborations across industries, cultures and institutions. Dawn currently heads up i-DAT’s commercialisation and organisational management, making meaning and sustainable ventures out of complex interdisciplinary collaborations.

Being one of the first students to graduate from the renowned MediaLab Arts course at Plymouth University (now Digital Art and Technology) she has since worked across a number of sectors with roles that ranged from a sub editor in newspapers to a designer in the theatre before setting up Motiongrafik Ltd in 2000 – a Creative Digital Agency. Whilst running Motiongrafik Dawn set up initiatives to nurture and promote emerging  talent, including Young Motionplymouth – a young person’s film festival and Last Friday – a creatives’ monthly networking event. In 2005 she was given an Enterprising Woman award highlighting her success in business in the creative sector. She was also one of the co-founders of  Indra Congress (previously known as Arrow): an arts and reconciliation organisation working internationally with young people in the world’s trouble spots on creative expression as a tool for peacemaking.

Since 2008 Dawn has worked as entrepreneur, advisor, associate lecturer, board member and consultant across the educational, technology, creative and cultural sectors. She has successfully delivered core competencies such as strategy, bridge-building and relationship management, business conception, investment and development across a diverse portfolio. Integral in all of this is her ability and drive in bringing people together and realising their potential. A skill which Dawn frequently also applies to any two, three of four legged animal she meets, being a renowned and inherent animal lover and fixer.

mob: ++44-07876365210
eml: dawn.m.melville@plymouth.ac.uk

Dr Stavros Didakis

patconley Core Team, i-DAT, Supervisor
Dr Stavros Didakis

Stavros Didakis is an Associate Professor / Senior Lecturer (FT) and Programme Leader – Digital Media Design. After the successful completion of his PhD in Media Arts Technology in i-DAT he took the role of  senior lecturer in the course BA Technoetic Arts in Roy Ascott’s Detao Master Studio in SIVA, Shanghai.
He was born in Crete-Greece and he has followed studies in sound engineering, media, music technology & audio systems, sonic arts, and interface & interaction design in Athens, London, Belfast and Linz.

Stavros has a long-standing relationship with media, art and technology. For this reason he has created a media laboratory in Greece, called SoniconLab (www.soniconlab.com), which is mainly involved in the development and installation of interactive media systems and media performance technologies – ranging from experimental to commercial – and providing innovative solutions that are not met with current standards. The main reason that Stavros created this laboratory was to establish a new media consciousness in local or dis-local communities, and change the way people perceive and experience media works. Moreover, Stavros is a lecturer in MBS College/Nottingham Trent University, giving lectures in Multimedia and a series of workshops and seminars in sound technology, audiovisual performance, programming, interaction, and interface design.
His PhD research is primarily focused to the development and installation of interactive media technologies inside the architectural space, enabling a formation of sensate spaces that are created based on physiological and psychological studies. This approach defines alternatively the spaces we occupy and enables a new way of architectural and media experience.

Other research interests include ambiguous computing/ambient intelligence, hybrid instruments for media performance and expression, 3D design and immersive environments, real-time video processing, and audio visualisation.
PhD Provisional Title: A Study of Translucent Media Technologies in the Architectural Space.
http://stav-didakis.blogspot.com/

Professor Mike Phillips

patconley Core Team, i-DAT, Supervisor
Professor Mike Phillips

Mike Phillips is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at University of Plymouth, the Director of Research at i-DAT.org and a Principal Supervisor for the Planetary Collegium.

His R&D orbits a portfolio of projects that explore the ubiquity of data ‘harvested’ from an instrumentalised world and its potential as a material for revealing things that lie outside our normal frames of reference – things so far away, so close, so massive, so small and so ad infinitum. For more information see the i-DAT web site at: http://www.i-dat.org.

Phillips is an active member of an international transdisciplinary community that engages with immersive, interactive and performative technologies. He manages the Fulldome Immersive Vision Theatre (www.i-dat.org/ivt/), a transdisciplinary instrument for manifesting (im)material and imaginary worlds and is a founding partner of FullDome UK (http://www.fulldome.org.uk/).

He has secured a portfolio of national and international research funding, including: Arts Council England (GFA’s and National Portfolio Organisation status), NESTA, AHRC, EPSRC, British Council, EU (European Culture Programme, ESF, EU FP7), as well as significant industrial support and sponsorships. Phillips has an extensive PGR supervisory experience with 77 completions and currently 21 PhD students across i-DAT, CODEX, Roy Ascott’s Planetary Collegium, and 3D3.

Dr Gianni Corino

patconley Core Team, i-DAT, Supervisor
Dr Gianni Corino

Gianni Corino.
Dr. Gianni Corino is Associate Professor in Interactive Media, i-DAT’s Creative Producer and Programme Leader for MRes Digital Art and Technology at Plymouth University. His interdisciplinary research explores the idea of performativity, embodied and social networks and emergent technological practices. In latest works he investigates the relevance of the ‘thing’ and the ‘object’ from a philosophical and social perspective in the context of the Internet of to propose alternative design approaches to the field and to facilitate this he established the “Smarter Planet Lab” as an interdisciplinary facility in partnership with IBM – Hursley Innovation Centre.
He has published on journals and books

across various disciplines (social, design, media), his latest article talks about a theory object called Thingbook, The Society of all Things (Humans, Animals, Things and Data). Previous projects include Remote Risonanaze, Quixote or Dn[t]cube. Remote Risonanze (in collaboration with Piero Gilardi and Elisa Giaccardi), is a sonic installation controlled via a virtual reality platform over Internet; Dn[t]cube (in collaboration with Lorenzo Verna) is a participatory interactive installation to generate semantic ontologies; Metrobosco (in collaboration with Chiara Boeri), a participatory installation  for urban redevelopment; Quixote, a locative media project and Transactional Props, a cybernetic installation about and for the IoT.

Birgitte Aga

patconley Core Team, i-DAT, Researcher
Birgitte Aga

Dr Birgitte Aga [B] is a creative technologist, researcher, producer and designer with an MBA in innovation and a PhD in conversational AI. She has 20 years of experience initiating and producing R&D with a focus on the creative application of emergent technologies, in particular conversational voice and text-enabled experiences.

She also creates conversational AI artworks, curates exhibitions, presents at international conferences and delivers a program of workshops that claim, drive and develop technological innovation for cultural, artistic and social impact. Central to her work is an ethos of collaboration with people, companies and cultural venues, driven by an ambition to engage the next generation of young people (in particular women) in designing future AI technologies.

Birgitte is also a South West Creative Technology Fellow (UK) for automation/AI, co-organiser of the Fulldome UK Biennial (UK), part of the  i-DAT Research & Design Collective and in receipt of funding from the ACE Artists International Development fund (UK).

mail: baga@plymouth.ac.uk

https://birgitteaga.com/